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Fusion Energy
This division promotes the development and timely introduction of fusion energy as a sustainable energy source with favorable economic, environmental, and safety attributes. The division cooperates with other organizations on common issues of multidisciplinary fusion science and technology, conducts professional meetings, and disseminates technical information in support of these goals. Members focus on the assessment and resolution of critical developmental issues for practical fusion energy applications.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
Young S. Ham, Shivakumar Sitaraman
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 401-418
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12312
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A novel methodology to detect diversion of spent fuel from pressurized water reactors (PWRs) has been developed in order to address a long unsolved safeguards verification problem for an international safeguards organization such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) or European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM). The concept involves inserting tiny neutron and gamma detectors into the guide tubes of a spent fuel assembly (SFA) and measuring the signals. The guide tubes form a quadrant symmetric pattern in the various PWR fuel product lines, and the neutron and gamma signals from these various locations are processed to obtain a unique signature for an undisturbed SFA. Signatures based on the neutron and gamma signals individually or in a combination can be developed. Removal of fuel pins from the SFA will cause the signatures to be visibly perturbed thus enabling the detection of diversion. All of the required signal processing to obtain signatures can be performed on standard laptop computers.Monte Carlo simulation studies and a set of controlled experiments with actual commercial PWR SFAs were performed, and they validated this novel methodology. Based on the simulation studies and benchmarking measurements, the methodology promises to be a powerful and practical way to detect partial defects that constitute 10% or more of the total active fuel pins. This far exceeds the IAEA goal that for SFAs that can be dismantled at the facility - which is essentially the case for most PWR fuel - the partial defect test used should assure that at least half the fuel pins are present in each SFA. The methodology does not rely on any operator-provided data like burnup or cooling time and does not require movement of the SFA from the storage rack in the spent-fuel pool.